Abu-Ghazaleh: We are facing an aggressive attack to distort Arabic Language

At the World Arabic Language Day

Abu-Ghazaleh: We are facing an aggressive attack to distort Arabic Language

TAG-Org embarked on a mission to protect Arabic language since its establishment

AMMAN - December 23,2015 - Talal Abu-Ghazaleh Organization (TAG-Org) organized a special celebration on the occasion of the World Arabic Language Day patronized by HE Dr. Talal Abu-Ghazaleh with the attendance of interested experts, journalists and social media experts in an event held at Talal Abu-Ghazaleh University.

Arabic language speakers celebrate the UN Arabic Language Day on December 18th of each year as it’s is the date when the General Assembly approved Arabic as an official UN language.

 Dr. Abu-Ghazaleh stressed that we face an aggressive attack from other languages against our native language saying that it has been selected to be distorted, that is why we see nowadays Arabizi while we do not see any other language with a distortion like this, indicating that at TAG-Org since the start aimed at protecting Arabic language by many initiatives.

He said that since the Organization was established in 1972, we issued Arabic dictionaries that can help a lot of professions starting with the accounting, Intellectual Property, the legal terms and IT dictionaries, we founded also a translation company which became one of the biggest companies in the world and it translates from other languages into standard Arabic and does work for national institutions, governments and companies.

Whereas the UN and before the year 2000 did not have a special definition to the Middle East region, Dr. Abu-Ghazaleh when he was elected the head of the UN ICT Taskforce he requested to define the Middle East region as the “Arab Region, and it has been since then.

Due to the lack of content on the Internet, which is limited by Wikipedia with unverified content, and does not  have more than 400 thousand articles that are ready to be distorted any time, Dr. Abu-Ghazaleh stated that TAGIPEDIA initiative the digital encyclopedia came as the credible source which will be launched next year when the content reaches one million and a half articles.

Meanwhile, other initiatives   relates to the Arab Summit’s resolution declaring the 2015-2024 a decade to eradicate illiteracy in the Arab countries through three paths: linguistically, digitally and culturally, and a taskforce was formed to coordinate between representatives of the concerned ministries, and TAG-Org works also helping them apply this decision.

As he is strictly against the Arabizi phenomenon, Dr. Abu-Ghazaleh said that TAG-Org recently launched a campaign named “My Arabic Language” which aims to talk about the risks that encounter Arabic language and Arabic content on the Internet, calling for an official firm decision t that prohibits the use of Arabizi stressing that Arabic language lived and stayed because it is the language of the Quran.

At the end of the gathering, Dr. Abu-Ghazaleh replied to the attendants’ questions about the role of social media on the future of the Arabic language, he indicated that these technological means do not have a nationality, however, the user is the one who identifies its nationality and subsequently we decide the future of the language.

As for the official government role of the Arabic content on the Internet, he stressed that governments should provide the environment and we should contribute to the richness of the Arabic content on the Internet not waiting to governments to accomplish our roles.

Regarding Education, he said that he heads the Arabic organization for education quality, pointing that he is against what was said "educations is for all”, he corrected it to be “good education is for all”, indicating that we in the organization need the schools and universities to work within specific qualities provided to follow high quality education.

He noted that the Organization started to teach Arabic in China, pointing that this is one of the initiatives that we can do to publish Arabic language in the world especially that China’s population is one billion and a half.

It is worth mentioning that the gathering was organized to enrich the Arabic content on the Internet, where TAG-Org released the initiative #Myarabic_language to show how we preserve our language, to tweet and to write the content in Arabic on the World Wide Web at least for one day.